How To Donate
Please visit http://www.gpuug.org/catalog. From there, you will be able to donate to our current projects using Paypal, check or money order.

What We Do With Your Money
As we are a 100% volunteer funded and supported organization, we are able to allocated 100% of all donated funds (minus Paypal fees) toward projects which directly benefit SETI at Home.

501c3 Recognized Entity
The GPU Users Group Inc. is a recognized 501c3 organization in the United States. This means that your donations may be tax deductible on your federal income taxes. Our EIN for tax purposes is 45-2969708.

Sponsors
Thanks to our corporate sponsor NKOL http://www.nkol.net/, we are able to build items such as servers at a steep discount allowing us to stretch our donor's dollars.

Direct SETI Donations
We now offer the ability to donate directly to SETI at Home via the Paypal service. If you would like to donate directly to SETI at Home please visit http://www.gpuug.org/donatecash.

1. We are currently waiting for the Lab team to test our donated 10GbE switch donated by Terabit Systems. Once testing is completed we will begin the procurement process for another 10GbE switch which will be a mirror of the donated model however likely with 26+ ports.

2. We'll be announcing a new partnership soonish once we get a few more ducks in a row.

3. We're also working on a few new hardware donation projects which are directly related to the infrastructure of the lab. For more on our first big step please see the below post about our most recent hardware donation.
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We were approached by Terabit Systems http://www.terabitsystems.com who were interested in donating hardware to the SETI @ Home project. After much back and forth between the GPUUG staff, SETI @ Home scientists and Terabit Systems, we were able to procure a donation for the following items:

What this means for the science processors of SETI @ Home is that we will soon be installing a new closet switch which should greatly help throughput between the lab and the end user. The 10GbE switch will also be pushed into service shortly.

These switches were donated and paid for in full by Terabit systems and represent a significant monetary value in hardware.

To add a cherry onto the top of today's cake, on Aug 15, 2012 we will petition Paypal for reduced Paypal transaction fees. Paypal has a feature which allows registered 501c3 entities to submit their 501c3 charter documents for approval. Upon receiving this, we will receive significantly reduced Paypal transactional fees for incoming donations which means we can stretch our donors monetary contributions even further.

We should hear back from Paypal in a week or so on the above. Once we get approval I will post another newsletter.

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Lastly I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to:

- Terabit Systems, specifically Mr. Charles Hurbert for his help in procuring the switch donations for SETI @ Home.

- The SETI scientific team of Eric Korpela, Jeff Cobb, Dan Werthimer and Matt Lebofsky for their quick responses in helping bring this donation to fruition.

- The GPUUG team of Jason Groothius and Phil Horney for their hard work in evaluating components and generally working hard behind the scenes.

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That's all I have for now, thank you everyone for your continued interest and support.
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- Terabit Systems, specifically Mr. Charles Hurbert for his help in procuring the switch donations for SETI @ Home.

That's great news.
I don't know what the present situation in the Lab is, but i suspect with the new hardware the big choke points these days would be shifting data between the various systems.
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Grant
Darwin NT.

Synopsis: We will be providing 40 inexpensive hard drives to the SETI @ Home Project for both the Hydrogen Survey and to upgrade the S&H data storage size as well as reduce the overall cost per gigabyte of stored data.

This project will serve two purposes.

1. It will provide 16 internal SATA drives for Eric's Hydrogen Survey. These drives will be placed 16 internal slots at 3GBPS which allows us the opportunity to purchase lesser cost drives for this project. For more on the Hydrogen survey please visit http://www.naic.edu/~igalfa/

2. Secondly the remaining 24 drives will be placed into 24 external expansion drive slots at 1.5GBPS. These drives will be used to both upgrade data storage for SETI at Home and more importantly, reduce the cost of this data storage. Current data storage for S&H is costing the project around $0.21/Gig. With the addition of these new drives, we can reduce this cost to around $0.09/Gig. This represents a significant savings to the project.

2. Given the relative low cost of these drives, I'm hoping this option will be more attractive. Through our Donate - A - Drive system, interested parties can visit http://www.gpuug.org/content/cash-4-drive-hitachi-gst-deskstar-7k1000c and purchase whatever quantity of drives they'd like for the project. Once the donor purchases a drive through this feature, we will simply go to the lowest cost vendor and purchase/ship these drives to SETI, usually on the same day the donation occurs.

As drives are purchased through this feature, we will be reducing the total goal amount from the main fundraiser until we reach the required 40 drives for this project.
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Somehow in the time it took to write the above, the price dropped to $69.99 per drive. Now's the time to pick up a few of these for the project if you're interested in donating. Give me a few minutes to update the totals here and on the GPUUG website to reflect the lower cost of these drives.

Chris S. has generously agreed to let us purchase 5 of the Hydrogen / SETI Storage drives for the project instead of 3 2TB transport drives he originally donated through our Hardware Donation feature. The Hydrogen/Storage drives are more mission critical at this point, so a big thanks to Chris!

We purchased 5 of these drives today for $375.32. This gives us a remainder on his original donation of $14.78. I'll remove $14.78 from the main pool donation for the remaining 35 drives.

Thank you Mark! Phil also extends his thanks for your testing of our new quantity system in the store. He set it up so that if someone wants to donate, for example, 10 drives, they can simply add that quantity into their cart vs. having to do the math as to what $70 x (number of drives) is.

Big thank you to all of our donors thus far, I really appreciate each of you helping fund this project so quickly.
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Just a daft question. "The 10Gbit switch will become part of a very high speed SETI spectrometer to be deployed at the Greenbank Telescope." I assume that this helps SETI@Home in some way? Because there is no explanation as to what this does.
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Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.